In the communication field, the data services, data switching and transmission are currently performed in the Ethernet through packet forwarding. The packet is forwarded through a local clock (transmission frequency). Because all the Network Elements (NEs) in a working system may have different local clocks, both sides of the packet switching network need to be synchronized through a synchronization technology.
In the prior art, the data transmitted on an Optical Transport Network (OTN) is encapsulated through a Transparent Generic Framing Procedure (GFP-T) encapsulation method.
Because the GFP-T encapsulates all data (including IDLE) of fast ethernet (FE), the receiver may receive all transmitter data, where the data rate is the physical layer clock frequency of the transmitter. The receiver may recover the physical layer clock frequency of the transmitter by using a phase-locked loop based on the data receiving rate.
However, in the process of implementing the present disclosure, it was found that the foregoing synchronization technology, when applied to the OTN, leads to a low utilization ratio of bandwidth and waste of bandwidth because all data is encapsulated through the GFP-T encapsulation method. Moreover, the receiver uses a complicated phase-locked loop to recover the clock based on the data receiving rate, resulting in complicated technology, high costs, and fragile performance.